Survival Behavior-Why We Do What We Do When Life Gets Strange

This is the first part of an article I wrote for Frontline Magazine, a publication in Canada. I’ll be posting it in sections, each week for 5 weeks. I hope you enjoy it, and I look forward to hearing your feedback.

In recent years the word ‘survival’ has taken on a new meaning to those who may consider themselves safe from anything related to the topic.

From the comfort of our recliner we can watch Bear Grylls or Les Stroud among others, show us what NOT to do in the desert, or on a glacier, or on the plains of Africa, or once we find ourselves there, perhaps how to survive and find our way out. This allows us to live precariously through their heavily edited footage, and feel relatively secure in our knowledge of starting a fire with two sticks or procuring safe drinking water if we wake up in one of these environments. We’ll commit these skills to memory as we make our trip to the fridge or the bathroom during the commercial break.

The reality is that we use survival skills everyday. To make it from our home to where we work, navigate through the day, and return home when our work is done. We survive financially, spiritually, and in our personal and professional relationships. It’s simply a matter of degrees, and once we’ve become established in our daily patterns we take this process as the status quo of doing business. After that we don’t usually need to ponder our routine outside of the incidental adjustments; unless something happens to cause a major interruption in that routine.

And depending on severity, that interruption is where our attention is directed away from the daily routine and focused on what our next course of action will be; to recover from that interruption and get back into our routine, or to simply survive that moment.

In September 2007, 18 year-old Julian McCormick lost control of his vehicle and landed upside down in a ditch just off of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway less than one mile from his home. In and out of consciousness and hanging from his seat belt, Julian survived eight days by drinking stream water and capturing and eating a fish from the stream. In spite of his serious injuries, he was later able to extract himself from the vehicle and crawl up the embankment and signal for help, lying near the edge of the highway where he was rescued by passing motorists.

August 18, 2000, then 82-year-old grandmother Tillie Tooter was driving on Highway 595 in Broward County, Florida on her way to pick up her daughter at the airport. She was in no particular hurry, driving about 50 mph in the slower lane of traffic. She was hit from behind without warning and sent careening off the suspended highway down into the swampy mangrove forest below, rupturing a disc in her spine and severely injuring both arms. Her vehicle was upside down, and she was suspended from her seat belt. She survived by drinking rainwater and eating a cough drop, a peppermint candy and some gum. She was rescued three days later.

There is a trend here. And it’s not that they all ended up suspended upside down from their seatbelts, or even that they were all using their seat belts.

Theses people were in a familiar area, doing something that they did regularly, (driving) and without much planning or forethought. Then without warning they were placed in a life-threatening situation that required them to take action to save their own lives or possibly perish. Don’t think it can happen to you? Neither did they.

Next week I’ll continue with the next part of this. When you close this article, stop for 15 seconds to consider how prepared you are to deal with anything that’s NOT in your schedule for today, or tomorrow. Because when things out of the ordinary happen, 15 seconds can seem like a really long time.

Second Installment -The Will To Survive- (https://rickmcelrath.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/the-will-to-survive/)